Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 18 May 1998 10:02:27 -0400
From:      sbabkin@dcn.att.com
To:        al@cn.ua
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   RE: FreeBSD in embeded systems?
Message-ID:  <C50B6FBA632FD111AF0F0000C0AD71EEACDF3E@dcn71.dcn.att.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> ----------
> From: 	Alexey Lukin[SMTP:al@cn.ua]
> 
>> As has been said on -hackers, there are IDE-like fllash cards.
>> a friend of mine has built a bsd/os based router using one.
>> I have bcc'ed this to him to see if he wishes to contribute.
>
>Well, it's a good "first step" solution for router but it has 2 main
>drawbacks for embeded systems in general:
>
>1) kernel gets biger with IDE drivers, and 

Memory is really cheap now and flash cards are big enough.

>2) booting time gets
>unacceptable for embeded systems.
>Imagine systen with watchdog timer: it should be ready after hardware
>reset in a very short time, but
>BIOS and kernel "thinks" appr 60-80 sec on IDE devices. Too long for my
>applications. 

Try to get a CISCO router and watch how long does it take to boot. :-)
You can easily add the signaling to watchdog device to the probe/attach
code of IDE drivers. If you want somewhat redundant,
you will need two machines anyway. And, if you are going only to
boot the kernel with MFS from IDE device and make no references
to it later, you don't have to include the UDE drivers into the kernel.

By the way, don't forget about BIOS boot-up time.

>Well, yet another little silly thing - fsck on real filesystem. It may
>wait for maintainer forever :-)

Huh ? Why would you need fsck in an embedded system ? It's quite enough
to use some raw storage for configuration and log file(s).

>Yet another problem with FreeBSD in embeded systems: gziped kernel and
>binaries 
>are not supported as standard feature. Well, it's not a big deal, but
>flash chips are expensive yet.

I'm not sure about kernel but the binaries surely are.

-SB

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?C50B6FBA632FD111AF0F0000C0AD71EEACDF3E>